I’ve been watchnig Al Jazeera and BBC live reports on Egypt for two weeks now. Have you? You should have. I don’t recall ever seeing a game about modern non-violent revolutions. I find it fairly amazing, considering the impact they have had in recent history. Revolutions like the Egyptian one have been occurring all over the world for more than twenty years now. My own country had one when I was eight. It wasn’t perfect, but there’s no doubt that 1989 changed Europe for the better. Now Middle East is having their chance. Even if the Egyptian army never lets go of the power they have now, you can’t make a few million people forget the kind of experience they’ve just had. More importantly, it’s a huge, untapped source of compelling gameplay. Modern non-violent revolutions are very dramatic, very to the point, have excellent pacing, and are a perfect example of assymetric struggle. You can interpret them as the state versus the people, or dictatorship versus the republic. But their most important aspect is the struggle between centralised technologies of the industrial age and distributed technologies of the information age. The state uses armed forces and television. The people uses crowd psychology and communication networks. The state exerts control by giving orders and withholding information. The people exerts control by spreading information and defying orders.